1 - The Gospel of Rehabilitation

Summary

Chapter 1 examines the construction of large-scale national systems for rehabilitating the war disabled, which began in the final months of 1914, with the establishment of the first wartime institutions for vocational re-education, and grew, over the course of the conflict, to include administrative bodies, organisational structures, and legal frameworks for the provisioning of care. They were constantly retooled and restructured in order to make them more efficient and more responsive to the needs of nations at war. By 1918, they had become remarkably sophisticated and, moreover, strikingly similar to one another – the result of a dedicated transnational movement of people and ideas and of a shared aim. This unity of purpose, however, did not exclude revisionist interpretations of rehabilitation programmes that overstressed their dissimilarities and imagined such systems – and the men they served – as nationally or ethnically particular nor did it resolve tensions between competing ideas about care, philanthropy, and the state.